Related papers: Proprioceptive multistable mechanical metamaterial…
Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…
Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
While its biological significance is well-documented, its application in soft robotics, particularly for the transport of fragile and irregularly shaped objects, remains underexplored. This study presents a modular soft robotic actuator…
Metamaterials are artificial materials designed to exhibit effective material parameters that go beyond those found in nature. Composed of unit cells with rich designability that are assembled into multiscale systems, they hold great…
Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is…
Active metamaterials are a type of metamaterial with tunable properties enabled by structural reconfigurations. Existing active metamaterials often achieve only a limited number of structural reconfigurations upon the application of an…
Metamaterials are arrangement of basic building blocks that repeat in space, time, or both. These material systems serve as an excellent platform for controlling waves, such as engineering wavenumber band gaps, flat bands, and…
Compared to rigid hands, underactuated compliant hands offer greater adaptability to object shapes, provide stable grasps, and are often more cost-effective. However, they introduce uncertainties in hand-object interactions due to their…
Soft robots could bring robotic systems to new horizons, by enabling safe human-machine interaction. For precise control, these soft structures require high level position feedback that is not easily achieved through conventional…
To enable robots to develop human-like fine manipulation, it is essential to understand how mechanical compliance, multi-modal sensing, and purposeful interaction jointly shape tactile perception. In this study, we use a dedicated modular…
This work presents NeuroTouch, an optical-based tactile sensor that combines a highly deformable dome-shaped soft material with an integrated neuromorphic camera, leveraging frame-based and dynamic vision for gesture detection. Our approach…
This paper presents a control interface to translate the residual body motions of individuals living with severe disabilities, into control commands for body-machine interaction. A custom, wireless, wearable multi-sensor network is used to…
The meta-material sensor has been regarded as a next-generation sensing technology for the battery-free Internet of Things (IoT) due to its battery-free characteristic and improved sensing performance. The meta-material sensors function as…
Visuotactile sensors provide high-resolution tactile information but are incapable of perceiving the material features of objects. We present UltraTac, an integrated sensor that combines visuotactile imaging with ultrasound sensing through…
Due to the complexity of modeling the elastic properties of materials, the use of machine learning algorithms is continuously increasing for tactile sensing applications. Recent advances in deep neural networks applied to computer vision…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
State estimation from measured data is crucial for robotic applications as autonomous systems rely on sensors to capture the motion and localize in the 3D world. Among sensors that are designed for measuring a robot's pose, or for soft…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Recently there has been an increase in demand for soft and biocompatible electronic devices capable of withstanding large stretch. Ionically conductive polymers present a promising class of soft materials for these emerging applications due…